Two weeks ago I blogged about, among other things, how VANCE MAJOR retired from fan films only to discover that his 7-year-old son ROYCE MAJOR wanted to make fan films! In fact, here’s one of Royce’s first projects.
Over the years, Vance and I have swapped “dad” stories and compared notes, as my 13-year-old son Jayden is very similar to Royce: Star Trek and sci-fi fans, very into computers, very creative, adorable, and way smarter than their dads (both Vance and I both are totally out of our league when it comes to our kids completely lapping us!). And as I was giving Vance some compliments on Royce’s latest efforts and praising his involvement as a father in encouraging Royce’s passions, I told Vance a little about what Jayden was up to these days.
“Y’know, Jonathan, I’d really like to read a blog about that,” Vance said to me. “I mean, it’s great reading about all these other fan filmmakers and their projects, but Jayden is the ‘next generation,’ and finding out what he’s been doing would be really interesting…to me, at least. You really should write a blog about Jayden and his latest projects.”
Okay, Vance, because you asked for it…!
Like many kids, Jayden has a lot of hobbies and interests. He builds competitive robots and takes karate. We watch Star Trek, Stargate, and other sci-fi together. He spends waaaaaaay too much time viewing YouTube videos, but welcome to Generation Alpha (the next one after Gen Z). He hangs out on Discord in a bunch of special interest group servers (he even has a server of his own), he has his own YouTube Channel, and has friends and followers all over the world (he says that people from other countries are nicer than Americans). And yes, Mommy and I feel completely overwhelmed trying to keep track of and monitor all of this online activity…heaven help us!
Fortunately, Jayden is at his core a “good kid”—kind, empathetic to others, and a bit of a prude. We’ve discussed online privacy and safety with him, and he gets it. Like many parents, we’re crossing our fingers that the genie doesn’t get too far out of the bottle, but eventually you just have to trust that you’ve raised your kid right.
One of the things that completely blows our minds—in addition to the robot-building—is Jayden’s ability to code video games. He creates his projects using the Scratch game engine (developed at MIT for kids) at a level that, frankly, most 13-year-olds aren’t even close to being able to do.
You’ve obviously heard of fan films, but did you know there are also fan GAMES? Jayden, along with possibly hundreds of others, has taken to creating video games based on a 2D online game released in 2015 called Undertale (read more about it here).
Here’s a short segment of one of literally dozens of fan games that Jayden was created based on Undertale…
Yeah, a 13-year-old made that—and it isn’t even finished yet (that’s just Phase I)! Jayden will spend hours and hours coding…after he finishes his homework first. His ADHD allows him to hyper-focus, and his analytical mind can tackle bug-detection and fixing at warp speed. He doesn’t create the music, but he does remix some of it, and he creates and animates most of the graphics completely on his own based on previously-established characters.
As I said, our minds are totally blown every time we see a new posting on Jayden’s YouTube channel. But what got me chatting with Vance about our filmmaking offspring was Jayden’s latest assignment for middle school. Along with all of Jayden’s required classes like math, science, history, and language arts, Jayden is taking an elective class in filmmaking. How cool is that???
As the semester comes to a close, each student was given the assignment to create a video not longer than five minutes that could be either a music video or a commercial for movie or TV show or some kind of product. Everything else was up to the student. For music videos, the music itself didn’t have to be original. An existing song could be used, but the visuals needed to come from the student.
Jayden, always obsessed with Undertale, decided to use as music for his video project a song from 2016 by JT Music titled Down to the Bone, based on the story of the game and starring the two main characters, the brothers Sans and Papyrus. The music video I linked to has some impressive 3D graphics, but Jayden decided instead to return to the actual game graphics from 2015 and make his music video by recreating and animating those original elements.
But wait, there’s more!
Even though the assignment didn’t require it, Jayden decided to sing the lyrics himself rather than using the original song. Instead, he found an instrumental version, learned the words, and recorded himself doing both the voices of Sans and Papyrus, each sounding very different.
I’d like to say I helped him, but sadly, that ship seems to have sailed, as Jayden has gotten quite proficient with computers and doesn’t appear to need Daddy much anymore. I did help get him set up with my Yeti Nano microphone so his voice levels would balance and not distort, and I showed him how to use Adobe Audition to capture the audio. But that was essentially it. When it came time to mix his vocals with the instrumental music and add reverb and other audio effects, Jayden headed up to his room to complete the remix all by himself using CapCut.
By the time I saw him again a few hours later, the project had been uploaded to his YouTube channel, ready a week and a half early to debut in class on Monday (yesterday). I did find a couple of typos, and I also offered to tweak the vocals slightly in Adobe Premiere where they weren’t quite matching the beats of the music, but Jayden was D-O-N-E. (You need to pick your battles with a headstrong teenager.) And honestly, I couldn’t really complain. He’d completed the assignment putting a very decent amount of work into it. He’ll likely get an A or even A+ for well how it turned out. And even though his perfectionist dad would’ve gone back to make those tweaks and correct those typos, that’s me, not Jayden. In fact, Jayden even made fun of his refusing to do more picky work on the project by adding the the words “lazy remake” to the title of the video! (Smart ass.)
And so it is, with the pride of a father who adores his son and wants to share his achievements with my readers, I present to you Jayden’s final project for filmmaking class…